It's still rather choppy, sadly.

Yeah, I thought American Beauty and Casper.

I wish I'd seen this before I left LA (I'm on a trip right now), you coulda shot me a photo of your hardware and I'd walk into a FilmTools and eyeball all the things and go "yeah, I think your thing would fit into whatever you get" or not.

Off the top of my head... I'd guess you could probably make it work, between applying your best guess in the buying process and then doing crafty shit with a trip to the hardware store. But I can also totally imagine that not being true because the world is a cruel place.

LOOK WAT U DED

Nice work. *thumbs*

As for the name list jam-up you're dealing with, the easiest thing to do would be to make the thing in Photoshop (or similar, something that allows you to create images and save them with a transparent background) and use that instead of the title tool. For one thing, the title tool sucks in a profound way. For another thing, more importantly: doing that kind of thing with the title tool is hard on the software and really hard on you.

The second best thing would be to use After Effects or summat for creating the name lists separately. This would be very easy for someone to set up for ya and you just swap in the text as you need it. The result would probably be that you'd render out a pre-made name crawl movie on a transparent background, and bring that pre-made asset into APE as just another piece of footage. This approach does ostensibly require adding a step, as well as bringing another program into the mix, but the upside is that you will not feel homicidal after doing word processing tasks in After Effects or Photoshop as you feel doing them in editing software.

(An additional upgrade would be that someone could fiddle with expressions a bit and make it so the crawl is never pixel-jittery. This is probably a minor consideration in this case, but, it is a thing worth attempting where available.)

Also, I know you're fairly comfortable with web programming — one thing you could also try is making the "credits" as a big-ass webpage. Format it however you want, keep it on a black background. Then use any of the thousand "whole-page" browser print-screen tools available to make your image for you. Then just import that shit and position-keyframe it for the rolling animation.

Mmm. Well, the thing about Premiere Elements is that you've used it more than we have.

Anyway, the quickest way to understand keyframes is to forget that word for a minute. Zap it back out of existence in your brain.

So, in creative software, you adjust the properties of things — like what color your text is — until you've made it the way you want it. In static graphics, the story ends there. "I want red text." Photoshop is like "like this?,"  and you're like "yeah, that's super red, thanks." End of story. But, in graphics where time is a component, sometimes you want the color of the text to change over the course of your shot. Maybe you want it to start red, and end blue. You tell the computer "hey, red at the beginning is fine, but make it blue by the end," and the computer interpolates the necessary color changery to animate the text from red to blue over the course of your shot.

We call those directions that you gave the computer "keyframes." In this example, you set two of 'em: a keyframe at the beginning of the shot, which says "make the text color all the way red," and a keyframe at the end of the shot, which says "make the text color all the way blue," and over the course of the shot, that property (text color) goes from one to the other. At the halfway point, the text would be half-red half-blue, and so on.

It's just a little point of value data on a timeline, so you can change the value over time. You say "at Time A, I want Property B to be Value C", and so it is. If you didn't have another keyframe for that property, it'd just stay Value C forever. (And in that case, you wouldn't even need to "activate" keyframing anyway, because you could just... set it at Value C like you would in Photoshop and move on with your miserable afternoon.)

Anyway, eventually we all die in the end, but you knew that already. Questions? I can do this schpiel on video with a whiteboard if ya want.

If you'd benefit from a "Teague slowly explains all the major stuff one needs to know to begin editing in Premiere Pro" YouTube thing, I'd be happy to do that. Just fwiw.

The Malariathon was insane. Every now and then I find myself suddenly realizing that we are insane humans and we did that and what the hell.

You need to add a few scenes before the snail comes to a stop:

• Snail crossing frame in front of pyramids

• Snail crossing frame in front of Eiffel Tower

• Snail crossing frame in front of Coliseum

• Snail crossing frame in front of Circus Liquors

• Snail crossing frame in front of Welcome to Las Vegas sign

• Snail crossing frame in front of Christ the Redeemer

• Snail crossing frame in front of dancing Hare Krishnas on Hollywood Blvd.

• Snail crossing frame in front of Epcot, wearing Mickey-ears hat

*thumbs up*

Did you sample from the whole list of shortlist titles, or from the pared-down nominated lists?

One of the reasons I started from the whole shortlist instead of from the nom list is because — presumably — a fair amount of "okay but seriously though we're not nominating that fucking movie" selection bias is going to already be present in the nominee list... and what I'm interested in is movie title types that are proportionately under-represented by wins.

Or, in other words, when you limit your sample to pre-screened, nominated movies, we've just thrown out a whole lot of the shitty "of the"s... and naturally the scrubbed-up-and-nominated list will have a better batting average than the unwashed bakeoff list, but the point isn't how many times a nominated "of the" has won, but how many times a considered "of the" movie has made it through both filters.

YOUR MOTHER COMES UP WITH, AND IMPLEMENTS EFFICIENT ALGORITHMS!